Samuel Tongue

And with all of these poems and actually with a lot of Andrea Gibson's work, it's worth, if you're interested to find more of their work, is to find them on YouTube because they were a very proficient slam poet and winner of lots of slam competitions.

So their performance of their own work is really, really powerful.

Obviously, the poems live in other people's voices and in other people's understanding, but it's really worth seeing them performed as well.

A second poem that we looked at was a very short one, but apparently, again, looking at dates, this was written many years before a kind of terminal diagnosis, but without trying to use the poet's biography as a...

necessarily a way of fully understanding and getting to an exact meaning.

This one was written quite a while ago, according to dates.

But when you bring the poems together in a group, they speak to one another, of course, and our brains and minds make those links.

So this one is a short poem called Instead of Depression.

Instead of depression, try calling it hibernation.

Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing.

Hibernating animals don't even dream.

It's okay if you can't imagine spring.

Sleep through the alarm of the world.

Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, sweetheart, instead of a grave.

There was an echo here of the conversational address that Andrea uses where the poem is always in relationship.

It's intimate.

It's always trying to speak more widely than simply self-reference.

One of the participants here found the hopefulness of this poem around the fact that the idea that depression is a season.

It's a kind of that you can hibernate through perhaps.

It's a phase.